Rebecca Lindenberg’s poetic debut, Love, An Index (McSweeney’s, 2012), is a meditation on the tenderness and triumph of the human experience. Keenly making use of language, these poems negotiate the emotional and intellectual chaos emanating from an awareness of our mortality. The imagination inhabits the mind through the personal history of words making language and memory echo.

The death of poet Craig Arnold, Lindenberg’s partner of six years, is both confronted and averted in the numerable list and fragmented poems (“Love, A Footnote”; “Fragment”; “The Language of Flowers”; “Tumult”; “The Girl With the Ink-stained Teeth”) interspersed throughout this collection. From the start, the reader glimpses the intrinsic energy of the poetic line; propelling the reader into this collection, the final moment of the first poem, “What Rings But Can’t Be Answered,” is adroitly executed. Perhaps like Lindenberg who awaited a call from her missing lover, the speaker of this poem waits and anxiously considers what will happen “Behind a far-off door, a thought about me is being formed/ out of nothing but light./ And when that phone does ring—”

Dolor, heartache, and misery are gracefully conveyed. In “Litany”, a poem to the gods, Lindenberg pleads:

O you, with glass-colored wind at your call,

and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

whose voice returns the air to its forms, send me

a word for faith that also mean his thrum,

his coax…

More profoundly is the section titled “Love, an Index” that contains over thirty pages of words and definitions; this section mines painful and joyous moments of Lindenberg’s relationship with Arnold. Furthermore, as if to highlight the chaos of memory and of the mind, “Fragment” demonstrates her intelligibility of loss:

How you always

those soft hands of

head on my belly

I asked what you were thinking, you laughed,

said “Something about yellow curry.” I laughed and

listen, it’s just

(Not that you’d mind.)

The reader may grasp that this collection evokes feelings of love, suffering, and the satisfaction of sharing a life with a lover. Yet, there exists an inability to understand the absolute; these poems can never give us the full dimensional value of grief that results from the loss of a life. The greatest value of this collection is its plea which reminds the reader of the tangible experience that comes from knowing one another, of knowing what it’s like to love.